Policing, the protection of person and property, can and should be handled privately for reasons both ethical and prudential. This simple truth is often hard for most to swallow, especially those looking to rationalize the various forms of centralized control they’d like to continue exerting over the entire populace within a certain geographic area. Decentralized…

To claim that property rights matter regarding a question of justice is simply to assert that the means of an action matter, that every moral agent has a right to defend their body-property and that nobody has a right to initiate force against them. Property rights are the practical implementation of a not-so-radical notion: you can’t do good by doing wrong.

Libertarians following in the Rothbardian tradition (henceforth “libertarians”) hold that they need only assert, monitor and defend the existence a single right (the natural, human right to property) in order to give practical effect to Spencer’s Law of Equal Freedom, J.S. Mill’s Harm Principle or the now commonly advanced Non-Aggression Principle.

The ‘No Proper Statesman‘ is a fallacy akin to the ‘No true Scotsman‘. It is an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion. When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim (“States do not violate individuals’ rights”), rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original claim, the user instead modifies the original assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric,…

It’s common to see appeals to the status quo to justify theft, and those who do blithely assume that the status quo even works as advertised despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s like a slavery apologist responding to an abolitionist with, “why do you hate cotton, sugar, and tobacco?” One such example is featured…

Theories abound about the causes of the Financial Crisis of 2008, and “deregulation” is commonly indicted as one of the main culprits. With few relevant changes to financial regulation to point to, the so-called “dismantling of Glass-Steagall” is invariably cited as evidence, but the claim doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. In the words of one commenter:…

A common objection to living in a world ungoverned by a violent, territorial monopoly is that, without government, warlords would take over their own pieces of the country by force and violently go to war with one another in order to try and conquer the rest. Probably to illustrate their objections in as snarky a…